Microsoft In Private Pilot Test of Ad Revenue Sharing Scheme

[engine]

Microsoft In Private Pilot Test of Ad Revenue Sharing Scheme [news.cnet.com]

Microsoft is ready to start expanding its AdCenter engine to allow at least some publishers to include contextual advertising from Microsoft on their site. According to a letter detailing the program and published on TechCrunch, Microsoft is doing a pilot program that allows smaller publishers to use contextual advertising from Microsoft, putting it potentially in competition with Google's AdSense and Yahoo's publisher network.

In a statement provided to CNET News on Thursday, Microsoft confirmed the trial.

"Microsoft's self-serve advertising offering for publishers is still under development and is currently in a private pilot phase, being tested by select publishers who met the participation requirements," Microsoft said. "The private pilot phase began earlier this year."

I'm pretty sure everyone involved in Yahoo Publisher and Google AdSense will be keeping an eye on this project.

Microsoft's comment included a note about no specific launch plans just yet.

[advertising.microsoft.com...]

[shez]

Its Great :)
waited along for this....

[skibum]

As long as they offer advertisers an option to opt-out it sounds great. MSN search is small enough that if they start sending junk traffic from content that we can't avoid, the acount could just be shut down and not miss much. Improving Ad Center and making it easier to track match types would be preferable to having a content network to deal wtih.

[mmontala]

All I can say is "Always Imitated But Never Duplicated". If Yahoo! can't beat Google, how can MSN do it? (just an opinion)

[drall]

I am fairly excited about this ;)

[signor_john]

It's all about critical mass--something that Google has, and its rivals don't.

In other words, if a page is about "red widgets," there's a good chance that Google will have ads specifically targeted to people who are interested in red widgets. What's more, they'll be able to serve geotargeted "red widgets" ads internationally, not just in the U.S.. What other contextual ad networks have this kind of depth and reach?

[moTi]

somehow i suspect that microsoft has far more the will to get international in a short period of time with their product than yahoo ever had.
at least you can select many countries from the dropdown menu in their publisher subscription form.

it's 2008 and we're still waiting for a decent adsense alternative.

[iThink]

Some competition in this segment of market will help a lot.

[creative craig]

Some competition in this segment of market will help a lot.

Some competition in the search market would help a lot.

[Mohamed]

They can only compete with google adsense if they rollout to outside of the US.